Message: All about Beer and the loss of identity she feels after her mother’s death, but we don’t see the true meaning of the poem until the end. A journey of understand for the speaker.

Context: Beer = well known English poet. Beer’s mother died when she was 14, it affected her entire life. She started writing poetry after WW2 in italy and was classified as a New Romantic poet. A puritan Protestant.

Form, meter and rhyme

• 6 sestets, 36 lines

• No traditional form or regular meter

• NOT free verse however, organized structure shows a measure of control, aided by subtle rhyme scheme

• Irregular meter keeps readers alert, but is still measured and clam

• A B A B C C rhyme scheme but irregular, full of visual and half rhymes, subtle

• Cyclic poem - goes from present, to past, and back to present again

Speaker and setting: the speaker is a version or representative of Beer, there are strong biographical themes throughout showing that this is Beer’s story. The poem is set in the speaker’s present, but it’s a journey of understanding through her consciousness. As the poem progresses the tone of the speaker towards her mother gradually changes - from clear resentment and detachment, to an understanding.

Title:‘The Lost Woman…’

The title could refer to the daughter being lost, yet because this is not revealed until the end of the poem, we assume it’s referring to the mother. We are given a limited identity, yet the word ‘lost’ is telling as it indicates that if something is lost it can be found again. The use of elipses shows a lingering presence.

Language and poetic devices used:

Use of language in the first stanza shows that the death of the mother was a shock ‘shocking white ambulance’ / ‘no more warning’. The use of enjambment throughout the first stanza shows the rush the speaker is in to forget this painful memory. The full stop at the end of the stanza adds finality to the story and demonstrates that the speaker has no desire to relive this painful memory again.

The opening line ‘my mother went’ is very formal, hinting at an estranged relationship, and very firmly applying blame on the mother, the speaker feels she had a choice in death and there are tones of resentment for this.

Similarly, the opening lines of the second stanza hold the same detached tone over the mother’s death, their relationship seems distant and her retelling is harsh and blunt. Then there is a Volta of sorts, where the speaker begins her tale of fabrication, which she calls a ‘romance’.

The metaphor of ‘ivy mother turned into a tree’ is more telling of their relationship. The ivy presents and clingy and overbearing picture of the mother, yet in death she is transformed into a stoic and protecting tree, that shelters the speaker - showing the speaker wishes to remember a more nurturing version then she truly was. There is also a sad irony that in life it was the mother that was clingy, but in death the speaker clings onto the mother. Furthermore, as the ivy is invasive, it shows that the mother still permeates her life.

The simile of the rainbow in the second stanza is also telling of their relationship. Rainbows are a trick of light and perception, its use shows that the mother is a figure of the speaker’s imagination. Yet the speaker portrays her as elusive, this, coupled with the childish language shows how young the speaker was when her mother died and the lasting impact it’s had on her.

‘Cliche ridden’ - metaphor, compared to a pest. ‘Met her Match at an extra-Mural’, alliteration is powerful, plosive.

4th stanza introduces the idea of the universal lost woman. Anaphora of ‘a’ puts forward the idea that feelings of grief are repetitive and don’t go away. Anaphora of ‘who will not’ - mother is stuck at the moment of her death, the idolized vision that the daughter is creating of her mother robs her of her flaws and traits that made her human. However, the language used remains detached and distant throught the poem she/her/my mother.

Alliteration throughout adds texture to the poem, and there is the permeating feeling of guilt and regret.

Throughout the poem for the mother remains detached throughout the entirety of the poem ‘she’ - this shows the underlying feelings of regret, resentment, guilt and longing. The speaker and her mum had an arduous relationship which she is trying to mend now as she never got the chance.

Themes:

• Grief

• Loss

• Guilt

• Blame

• Truth

• Comfort

• Living with loss

Important idea:

Because the mother died before they had a chance to reconcile their differences or mend their relationship, therefore she changes her memories to fit with the ideal of what could’ve been.

The poem

My mother went with no more warning
than a bright voice and a bad pain.
Home from school on a June morning
And where the brook goes under the lane
I saw the back of a shocking white
Ambulance drawing away from the gate.

She never returned and I never saw
Her buried. So a romance began.
The ivy-mother turned into a tree
That still hops away like a rainbow down
The avenue as I approach.
My tendrils are the ones that clutch.

I made a life for her over the years.
Frustrated no more by a dull marriage
She ran a canteen through several wars.
The wit of a cliché-ridden village
She met her match at an extra-mural
Class and the OU summer school.

Many a hero in his time
And every poet has acquired
A lost woman to haunt the home,
To be compensated and desired,
Who will not alter, who will not grow,
A corpse they need never get to know.

She is nearly always benign. Her habit
Is not to stride at dead of night.
Soft and crepuscular in rabbit-
Light she comes out. Hear how they hate
Themselves for losing her as they did.
Her country is bland and she does not chide.

But my lost woman evermore snaps
From somewhere else: ‘You did not love me.
I sacrificed too much perhaps,
I showed you the way to rise above me
And you took it. You are the ghost
With the bat-voice, my dear. I am not lost.’